A new book, The World Atlas of Wine, captures the drinking's global expansion

Hugh Johnson peers into a glass of a jasmine-yellow white wine from the Republic of Georgia and sees an intriguing history and a promising future. "The Georgians are convinced that they invented wine 7,000 or 8,000 years ago," he says. "Their way of doing it has been considered out of the ordinary. Suddenly there are people all over the wine world who are really learning from Georgian methods." As he and Jancis Robinson write in the seventh edition of The World Atlas of Wine (Mitchell Beazley; 400 pages; $55 hardcover, $29.99 iBook), evidence of prebiblical vines has been uncovered in the...